You’ve heard the phrase “inmates running the asylum.” This would be the opposite.

Even at the best of times, and that isn’t saying much, it’s never really been clear who was running the show at the Briarcliff mental institution: its patients are so rarely genuinely crazy, their caregivers so frequently not quite sane.

In the first seven or eight episodes of FX Canada’s American Horror Story: Asylum, Jessica Lange’s disciplinarian Sister Jude was very clearly the one who was calling the shots. That changes dramatically Wednesday night as Jude wakes up to find herself defrocked and restrained, a patient now, subject to the same sort of punitive sadism she meted out when she was top nun.

Jude, as we have learned over the last few weeks, is no stranger to change. And neither is Jessica Lange — on this show alone and through her almost 40-year career.

The 63-year-old model-turned-actress made her film debut as the monkey bait in the 1976 remake of King Kong, and has gone on to win two Oscars and two Emmys, the most recent for her performance on the first season of American Horror Story.

Same show, entirely different character. Season 2 of American Horror Story recasts many of the actors from the first in an all-new and very different storyline.

“This thing kind of has a life of its own,” says Lange. “It’s like a river; it moves one direction and then it continues that way and then it shifts direction. I don’t know where it’s going. It’s kind of like life; you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

“It’s been an interesting way to work. It’s made me work in a much more fluid, I think in a braver way. I don’t plan things ahead of time. I don’t map out the character. I don’t do anything. It’s been for me a great, powerful exercise in working just in the moment, from this moment to the next moment. And I actually think that it’s made me a better actor, in a way, because of not being able to go into something predetermined.”

There is only so much you really even want to know about what is going on in American Horror Story, even less so this season than last.

“I think it’s darker,” Lange says. “I think the whole story is darker this time. It deals, I think, on a much darker psychological level. I think in some way last season was a ghost story and this season it really is the darker parts of the human psyche.

“I think the effect is that it’s hard to watch. I hear that from people a lot: ‘I can’t watch it, it’s too horrifying,’ or whatever. I don’t know. I think you have to strike a balance.

“I think this season became darker than anybody anticipated, just because of the subject areas that they laid out in the beginning. I mean, the thing with the ex-Nazi SS doctor and human experiments, and the serial killer based on this character Ed Gein, the warehousing of human beings in these institutions, madness . . . the Catholic Church . . . there’s a lot of subjects that they’re covering that lend themselves to great horror stories.”

And to great acting. “This woman is much more vulnerable and I think in some way tragic,” Lange says of Jude. “She’s destroyed her life. She’s an addict. She’s an alcoholic. She’s had bad luck with men, a lot of bad men in her life. And she’s come to the end of the road with the hopes that this church, that this man, the Monsignor, is going to save her, that she’ll become something else, that she’ll make her life worth living.

“And of course that all comes down, crashing, and she’s left absolutely alone, completely and totally alone, and those are two things I love playing because you also find them in (Tennessee) Williams’ characters, the thing of aloneness, the idea of being completely alone in the world. Couple that with madness and it’s a really potent combination to play.”

And possibly to overplay, Lange acknowledges. “With a part like this especially and where we’re going with it, I can’t pull any punches. I can’t do it halfway, especially when you’re dealing with madness and this descent into madness.

“I think there was a leap of faith on my part, just thinking, well, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this. I’m going to embrace this 100 per cent and hopefully somebody will look out for me and not let me completely humiliate myself.

“But, I don’t know, every once in a while, and I don’t really know how to describe it, something just happens within a scene and it feels right. It feels honest. It feels pure. And it feels like it’s elevated the character to something else.”

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